An Inconvenient Truth (2006)-Subtitle in Ms. Word(1)

8/10/2019 An Inconvenient Truth (2006)-Subtitle in Ms. Word(1)

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You look at that river gently flowing by

You notice the leaves rustling with the wind

You hear the birds.

You hear the tree frogs

In the distance, you hear a cow

You feel the grass.

The mud gives a little bit on the river bank.It's quiet. It's peaceful.

And all of a sudden, it's a gear shift inside you.

And it's like taking a deep breath and going,

!h, yeah, I forgot about this."

This is the first picture of the #arth from space that any of us ever

saw. It was taken on $hristmas #ve, %&( during the Apollo (

)ission. ...within relatively comfortable boundaries.

*ut we are filling up that thin shell of atmosphere with pollution.

+adies and gentlemen )r. Al ore I am Al ore. I used to be the ne-t

president of the nited /tates !f America. I don't find that particularly

funny. I've been trying to tell this story for a long time and I feel as

if I've failed to get the message across. I was in politics for a longtime and I'm proud of my service.

You gotta be kidding me. This is a national disaster. et every doggone

reyhound bus line in the country,and get their... moving to 0ew !rleans.

That's them thinking small, man,and this is a ma1or, ma1or, ma1or deal.

2hat do you need right now3 There are good people,who are in politics in

both parties who hold this at arm's length because if they acknowledge it

and recogni4e it,then the moral imperative to make big changes is

inescapable...unless you fi- the biggest damn crisis in the history of

this country

....scouted out landing spots and they lost radio contact when they went

around the dark side of the moon. And there was inevitably some suspense.Then when they came back in radio contact, they looked up and they

snapped this picture, and it became known as #arth 5ise. And that one

picture e-ploded in the consciousness of humankind. It lead to dramatic

changes.

2ithin %( months of this picture,the modern environmental movement had

begun. the ne-t picture was taken on the lastof the Apollo missions,

Apollo %6. This one was taken on 7ecember %%, %&68, and it is the most

commonly published photograph in all of history. And it's the only

picture of the #arth from space that we have where the sun was directly

behind the spacecraft so that the #arth is fully lit up and not partly in

darkness.

The ne-t image I'm gonna show you has almost never been seen. It was

taken by a spacecraft called The alileo that went out to e-plore the

solar system. And as it was leaving #arth's gravity, it turned its

cameras around and took a time lapse picture of one day's worth of

rotation,here compressed into 89 seconds.

Isn't that beautiful3


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This image is a magical image in a way.It was made by a friend of mine,

Tom :an /ant. ;e took year period, digitally stitched together. And he chose images that

would give a cloud>free view of every square inch of the #arth's surface.

All of the land masses accurately portrayed. 2hen that's all spread out,

it becomes an iconic image.

I show this because I wanna tell you a story about two teachers I had.

!ne that I didn't like that much,the other who is a real hero to me.

I had a grade school teacher who taught geography by pulling a map of the

world down in front of the blackboard. I had a classmate in the si-th

grade who raised his hand and he pointed to the outline of the east coast

of /outh America and he pointed to the west coast of Africa and he asked,

"7id they ever fit together3" and he asked, "7id they ever fit together3"

And the teacher said, "!f course not. That's the most ridiculous thing

I've ever heard." That student went on to become a drug addict and a

ne'er>do>well. The teacher went on to become science advisor in the

current administration.

*ut, you know,the teacher was actually reflecting the conclusion of thescientific establishment of that time. $ontinents are so big, obviously

they don't move.*ut, actually, as we now know,they did move. They moved

apart from one another. *ut at one time they did, in fact, fit together.

*ut that assumption was a problem.It reflected the well>known wisdom that

what gets us into trouble is not what we don't know, it's what we know

for sure that 1ust ain't so. This is actually an important point, believe

it or not, because there is anothersuch assumption

that a lot of people have in their minds right now about global warming

that 1ust ain't so. The assumption is something like this. The #arth is

so big we can't possibly have any lasting harmful impact on the #arth's

environment. And maybe that was true at one time, but it's not anymore.And one of the reasons it's not true anymore is that the most vulnerable

part of the #arth's ecological system is the atmosphere. :ulnerable

because it's so thin.

)y friend, the late $arl /agan,used to say,"If you had a big globe

with a coat of varnish on it,"the thickness of that varnish relative to

that globe "is pretty much the same "as the thickness of the #arth's

atmosphere "compared to the #arth itself." And it's thin enough that we

are capable of changing its composition. That brings up the basic science

of global warming.

And I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on this because you know it well.The sun's radiation comes in in the form of light waves and that heats up

the #arth. And then some of the radiation that is absorbed and warms the

#arth is reradiated back into space in the form of infrared radiation.

And some of the outgoing infrared radiation is trapped by this layer of

atmosphere and held inside the atmosphere. And that's a good thing

because it keeps the temperature of the #arth within certain boundaries,

keeps it relatively constant and livable.


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*ut the problem is this thin layer of atmosphere is being thickened by

all of the global warming pollution that's being put up there. And what

that does is it thickens this layer of atmosphere, more of the outgoing

infrared is trapped. And so the atmosphere heats up worldwide. That's

global warming. 0ow, that's the traditional e-planation.

;ere's what I think is a better e-planation. You're probably wonderingwhy your ice cream went away. 2ell, /usie, the culprit isn't foreigners.

It's global warming.

> lobal...

> Yeah.

)eet )r. /unbeam. ;e comes all the way from the sun visit #arth. ;ello,

#arth. ?ust popping in to brighten your day. And now I'll be on my way.

0ot so fast, /unbeam. 2e're greenhouse gases. You ain't going nowhere.

!h, od, it hurts. @retty soon, #arth is chock>full of /unbeams. Their

rotting corpses heating our atmosphere.

;ow do we get rid of the greenhouse grasses3

ortunately, our handsomest politicians came up with a cheap, last>minute

way to combat global warming. #ver since 8= *ut...

> !nce and for allB

This is the image that started me in my interest in this issue. And I saw

it when I was a college student because I had a professor named 5oger

5evelle who was the first person to propose measuring carbon dio-ide inthe #arth's atmosphere. ;e saw where the story was going after the first

few chapters. After the first few years of data,

he intuited what it meant

for what was yet to come.

They designed the e-periment in %&C6.

;e hired $harles 7avid Deeling

who was very faithful and precise

in making these measurements

for decades.

They started sending

these weather balloons up every day

and they chose the middle of the @acific

because it was the area

that was most remote.


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And he was a very hard>nosed scientist. ;e really emphasi4ed the hard

data.It was a wonderful time for me because, like a lot of young people,

I came into contact with intellectual ferment,ideas that I'd never

considered in my wildest dreams before.

And he showed our class. The results of his measurements after only a few

years.It was startling to me. 0ow he was startled and made it clear to

our class what he felt the significance of it was.And I 1ust soaked it up

like a sponge.;e drew the connections between the larger changes in our

civili4ation,and this pattern that was now visible in the atmosphere of

the entire planet.And then he pro1ected into the future where this was

headed unless we made some ad1ustments. And it was 1ust as clear as day.

After the first seven, eight, nine years,you could see the pattern

that was developing.

*ut I asked a question.

2hy is it that it goes up and down

once each year3

And he e-plained that,

if you look at the land mass of the #arth,very little of it is south of

the equator.The vast ma1ority of it is north of the equator,and most of

the vegetation is north of the equator.And so, when the 0orthern

;emisphere is tilted toward the sun,as it is in our spring and summer,the

leaves come out and they breathe in carbon dio-ide,and the amount in the

atmosphere goes down.*ut when the 0orthern ;emisphere is tilted away from

the sun,as it is in our fall and winter,the leaves fall and e-hale carbon

dio-ide,and the amount in the atmosphere goes back up again.

And so, it's as if the entire #arth once each year breathes in and out./o

we started measuring carbon dio-ide in %&C(.And you can see that by themiddle '=s,when he showed my class this image,it was already clear that

it was going up.I respected him and learned from him so much, I followed

this.

And when I went to the $ongress

in the middle %&6=s,I helped to organi4e the first hearings on global

warming and asked my professor to come and be the leadoff witness. And I

thought that would have such a big impact,we'd be on the way to solving

this problem, but it didn't work that way.*ut I kept having hearings.

And in %&(9 I went to the /enate and really dug deeply into this issue

with science roundtables and the like.I wrote a book about it,ran for

@resident in %&((,partly to try to gain some visibility for that issue.And in %&&8 went to the 2hite ;ouse.2e passed a version of a carbon ta-

and some other measures

to try to address this.

2ent to Dyoto in %&&6 to help get a treaty that's so controversial,

in the / at least.In 8===,my opponent pledged to regulate $!8

and then...


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That was not a pledge that was kept.*ut the point of this is all this

time you can see what I have seen all these years.It 1ust keeps going up.

It is relentless.And now we're beginning to see the impact in the real

world.

This is )ount Diliman1aro more than


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And you can see each annual layer from the melting and re>free4ing,so

they can go back in a lot of these mountain glaciers %,=== years.

And they constructed a thermometer of the temperature.

The blue is cold and the red is warm.0ow, I show this for a couple of

reasons.0umber one, the so>called skeptics will sometimes say,

"!h, this whole thing,this is a cyclical phenomenon."There was a medieval

warming period,,after all."2ell, yeah, there was.There it is, right

there. There are two others.*ut compared to what's going on now,there's

1ust no comparison./o if you look at %,=== years'worth of temperature and

compare it to %,=== years of $!8, you can see how closely they fit

together.

0ow, %,=== years of $!8in the mountain glaciers, that's one thing.*ut in

Antarctica,they can go back C=,=== years.This incidentally is the first

time anybody outside of a small group of scientists has seen this image.

This is the present day era,and that's the last ice age.Then it goes up.

2e're going back in time now C=,=== years.That's the period of warming

between the last two ice ages.That's the second and third ice age back.

ourth, fifth, si-th and seventh ice age back.0ow, an important point.

In all of this time, C=,=== years,the $!8 level has never gone above


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2hen some of these children who are here are my age, here is what it's

going to be in less than C= years. You've heard of off the charts. 2ithin

less than C= years, it'll be here. There's not a single fact or date or

number that's been used to make this up that's in any controversy.

The so>called skeptics look at this and they say, "/o3 That seems

perfectly okay." "/o3 That seems perfectly okay."

2ell, again, if on the temperature side, if this much on the cold side is

a mile of ice over our heads, what would that much on the warm side be3

ltimately this is really not a political issue so much as a moral issue.

If we allow that to happen, it is deeply unethical. I had such faith in

our democratic system, our self>government. I actually thought and

believed that the story would be compelling enough to cause a real sea

change in the way the $ongress reacted to that issue.

I thought they would be startled, too. And they weren't. The struggles,

the victories that aren't really victories, the defeats that aren't

really defeats. They can serve to magnify the significance of sometrivial step forward, e-aggerate the seeming importance of some massive

setback.

April


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wave that killed time record for

typhoons.

@revious record was seven.

;ere are all %= of the ones they had in 8==9.

The science te-tbooks have had to be rewritten because they say that it'simpossible to have a hurricane in the /outh Atlantic. *ut the same year

the first one ever hit *ra4il.

/ummer of 8==C has been one for the books.

The first one was #mily that socked into YucatFn.

Then ;urricane 7ennis came along and it did a lot of damage, including to

the oil industry.

This is the largest oil platform in the world after 7ennis went through.

This one was driven into the bridge at )obile.

And then, of course, came Datrina. It's worth remembering that whenit hit lorida, it was a $ategory !ne. *ut it killed a lot of people and

caused billions of dollars' worth of damage. And then what happened3

*efore it hit 0ew !rleans, it went over warmer waters.

As the water temperature increases, the wind velocity increases and the

moisture content increases. And you'll see ;urricane Datrina


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form over lorida. And then as it comes into the gulf over that warm

water, it picks up that energy and gets stronger and stronger and

stronger.

+ook at that hurricane's eye. And, of course, the consequences were so

horrendous, there are no words to describe it. Yeah, we're getting

reports and calls that are 1ust breaking my heart. rom people saying,"I've been in my attic. I can't take it anymore. "The water is up to my

neck.

I don't think I can hold out.

And that's happening as we speak. 2e told everybody the importance of the

%6th /treet $anal issue.

2e said, @lease, please, take care of this. "2e don't care what you do.

igure it out."

/omething new for America. *ut how in od's name could that happen here3

There had been warnings that hurricanes would get stronger.There were warnings that this hurricane, days before it hit,

would breach the levees, would cause the kind of damage that it

ultimately did cause.

And one question we as a people need to decide is how we react when we

hear warnings from the leading scientists in the world. There was another

storm in the %&


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You make the best of it. It brought into clear focus the mission that I

had been pursuing for all these years, and

I started giving the slide show again. !ne often unnoticed effect

of global warming is it causes more precipitation, but more of it coming

in one>time big storm events. *ecause the evaporation off the oceansputs all the moisture up there, when storm conditions trigger the

downpour, more of it falls down. when storm conditions trigger the

downpour, more of it falls down.

The insurance industry has actually noticed this. Their recovered losses

are going up. You see the damage from these severe weather events3

And 8==C is not even on this yet. 2hen it does, it'll be off that chart.

#urope has 1ust had a year very similar to the one we've had where they

say nature's been going cra4y.

All kinds of unusual catastrophes, like a nature hike through the *ook of

5evelations.

looding in Asia. )umbai, India this past ?uly. Thirty>seven inches of

rain in 89 hours. *y far, the largest downpour that any city in India has

ever received. +ot of flooding in $hina, also.

lobal warming, parado-ically, causes not only more flooding, but also

more drought.

This neighboring province right ne-t door had a severe drought at the

same time these areas were flooding.

!ne of the reasons for this has to do with the fact that global warming

not only increases precipitation worldwide, but it also relocates theprecipitation. And focus most of all on this part of Africa 1ust on the

edge of the /ahara.

nbelievable tragedies have been unfolding there, and there are a lot of

reasons for it. *ut 7arfur and 0iger are among those tragedies.

And one of the factors that has been compounding them is the lack of

rainfall and the increasing drought.

This is +ake $had, once one of the largest lakes in the world.

It has dried up over the last few decades to almost nothing, vastly

complicating the other problems that they also have. The second reason

why this is a parado-.

lobal warming creates more evaporation off the oceans to seed the

clouds, but it sucks moisture out of the soil. /oil evaporation increases

dramatically with higher temperatures.

And that has consequences for us in the nited /tates, as well. so this

is the $arthage e-it.


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2hen I was %9 years old, I totaled the family car right there.

2ent off that shoulder, turned it over. And see this *lack Angus bull3

2e raised *lack Angus.

)y father was named *reeder of the )onth. ;e grew up on a farm.

All through his career in the /enate he continued to come back here andraise cattle. +earning it from your dad on the land, that's really

something special. )y childhood upbringing was a little unusual in the

sense that I spent eight months of each year in 2ashington 7$ in a small

little hotel apartment. And then the other four months were spent here on

this big, beautiful farm. I had a dog here. I had a pony here.

I could shoot my rifle here. I could go swimming in the river here.

o out and lay down in the grass. As a kid, it took me a while to learn

the difference between fun and work.

The places where people live were chosen because of the climate pattern

that has been pretty much the same on #arth since the end of the last ice

age %%,=== years ago.

;ere, on this farm, the patterns are changing. And it seems gradual

in the course of a human lifetime but in the course of time, as defined

by this river, it's happening very, very quickly.

Two canaries in the coal mine. irst one is in the Arctic. This, of

course, is the Arctic !cean, the floating ice cap. reenland, on its side

there. I say canary in the coal mine because the Arctic is

one of the two regions of the world that is e-periencing faster impacts

from global warming.

This is the largest ice shelf in the Arctic, the 2ard ;unt Ice /helf.

It 1ust cracked in half three years ago.

The scientists were astonished. these are called drunken trees

1ust going every which way. This is not caused by wind damage or alcohol

consumption. These trees put their roots down in the permafrost, and the

permafrost is thawing. And so they 1ust go every which way now.

This building was built on the permafrost and has collapsed as the

permafrost thaws.

This woman's house has had to be abandoned.

The pipeline is suffering a great deal of structural damage.

And incidentally, the oil that they want to produce in that protected

area in 0orthern Alaska, which I hope they don't, they have to depend ontrucks to go in and out of there. And the trucks go over the fro4en

ground. This shows the number of days that the tundra in Alaska is fro4en

enough to drive on it.

Thirty>five years ago, 88C days a year.

0ow it's below 6C days a year because the spring comes earlier and the

fall comes later and the temperatures 1ust keep on going up. I went up to

the 0orth @ole.


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I went under that ice cap in a nuclear submarine that surfaced through

the ice like this. /ince they started patrolling in %&C6, they have gone

under the ice and measured with their radar looking upwards to measure

how thick it is because they can only surface in areas where it's three

and a half feet thick or less. /o they have kept a meticulous record andthey wouldn't release it because it was national security.

I went up there in order to persuade them to release it, and they did.

And here's what that record shows. /tarting in %&6=, there was a

precipitous drop>off in the amount and e-tent and thickness of the Arctic

ice cap.

It has diminished by 9=E in 9= years. And there are now two ma1or studies

showing that within the ne-t C= to 6= years, in summertime it will be

completely gone. 0ow, you might say, "2hy is that a problem3"

And ";ow could the Arctic ice cap actually melt so quickly3"2hen the sun's rays hit the ice, more than &=E of it bounces off

right back into space like a mirror. *ut when it hits the open ocean,

more than &=E of it is absorbed.

And so, as the surrounding water gets warmer, it speeds up the melting of

the ice. 5ight now, the Arctic ice cap acts like a giant mirror.

All the sun's rays bounce off, more than &=E. It keeps the #arth cooler.

*ut as it melts and the open ocean receives that sun's energy instead,

more than &=E is absorbed.

/o there is a faster buildup of heat here, at the 0orth @ole, in the

Arctic !cean, and the Arctic generally than anywhere else on the planet.That's not good for creatures like polar bears who depend on the ice.

A new scientific study shows that for the first time they're finding

polar bears that have actually drowned, swimming long distances, up to =

miles, to find the ice. And they didn't find that before.

*ut what does it mean to us3 To look at a vast e-panse of open water

at the top of our world that used to be covered by ice. 2e ought to care

a lot because it has planetary effects.

The #arth's climate is like a big engine for redistributing heat

from the equator to the poles. And it does that by means of ocean

currents and wind currents. They tell us, the scientists do, that the#arth's climate is a nonlinear system. ?ust a fancy way they have of

saying that the changes are not all 1ust gradual. /ome of them come

suddenly, in big 1umps.

!n a worldwide basis, the annual average temperature is about C( degrees

ahrenheit. If we have an increase of five degrees, which is on the low

end of the pro1ections,look at how that translates globally.


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That means an increase of only one degree at the equator, but more than

%8 degrees at the pole. And so all those wind and ocean current patterns

that have formed since the last ice age and have been relatively stable,

they're all up in the air and they change. And one of the ones they're

most worried about, where they've spent a lot of time studying the

problem, is in the 0orth Atlantic where the ulf /tream comes up and

meets the cold winds coming off the Arctic over reenland.

And that evaporates so that the heat out of the ulf /tream and the steam

is carried over to 2estern #urope by the prevailing winds and the #arth's

rotation. *ut isn't it interesting that the whole ocean current system is

all linked together in this loop3 They call it the ocean conveyor.

And the red are the warm surface currents. The ulf /tream is

the best known of them. *ut the blue represent the cold currents running

in the opposite direction, and we don't see them at all because they run

along the bottom of the ocean. p in the 0orth Atlantic, after that heat

is pulled out what's left behind is colder water and saltier water

because the salt doesn't go anywhere.

And so that makes it denser and heavier. And so that cold, dense, heavy

water sinks at the rate of five billion gallons per second. And then that

pulls that current back south.

At the end of the last ice age, as the last glacier was receding from

0orth America, as the last glacier was receding from 0orth America,

the ice melted and a giant pool of fresh water formed in 0orth America.

And the reat +akes are the remnants of that huge lake. An ice dam on the

eastern border formed and one day it broke. And all that fresh water

came rushing out, ripping open the /t. +awrence there, and it diluted the

salty, dense, cold water, made it fresher and lighter, so it stopped

sinking.

And that pump shut off. And the heat transfer stopped.

And #urope went back into an ice age for another &== to %,=== years.

And the change from conditions like we have here today to an ice age took

place in perhaps as little as %= years' time.

/o that's a sudden 1ump. 0ow, of course that's not gonna happen again

because the glaciers of 0orth America are not there, and...

Is there any other big chunk of ice anywhere near there3 !h, yeah.

2e'll come back to that one.

It's e-tremely frustrating to me to communicate over and over again, asclearly as I can. And we are still, by far, the worst contributor to the

problem. And I look around and look for really meaningful signs that

we're about to really change.

I don't see it right now.


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A number of very reputable scientists have said that one factor of air

pollution is o-ides of nitrogen from decaying vegetation. This is what

causes the ha4e that gave the big /moky )ountains their name.

Thank you very much, okay.

This guy is so far off in the environmental e-treme, we'll be up to ourneck in owls and out of work for every American. This guy is cra4y. #ven

if humans were causing global warming, and we are not, this could be

maybe the greatest hoa- ever perpetrated on the American people.

2e're dealing with something that's highly emotional.

If an issue is not on the tips of their constituents' tongues,

it's easy for them to ignore it. To say, "2ell, we'll deal with that

tomorrow."

/o the same phenomena of changing all these patterns is also affecting

the seasons.

;ere is a study from the 0etherlands. The peak arrival date for migratorybirds 8C years ago was April 8Cth, and their chicks hatched on ?une the


15/25

And we've had called new diseases that have emerged 1ust in the

last quarter century.

And a lot of them, like /A5/, have caused tremendous problems.

The resistant forms of tuberculosis. There are others.

And there's been a re>emergence of some diseases that were once under

control.

The avian flu, of course, quite a serious matter, as you know.

2est 0ile :irus. It came to the eastern shore of )aryland in %&&&.

Two years later, it was across the )ississippi.

And two years after that, it had spread across the continent.

*ut these are very troubling signs.

$oral reefs all over the world, because of global warming and other

factors, are bleaching and they end up like this.

And all the fish species that depend on the coral reefs are also in

1eopardy as a result.

!verall, species loss is now occurring at a rate %,=== times greater than

the natural background rate. This brings me to the second canary

in the coal mine.

Antarctica.

The largest mass of ice on the planet by far.

A friend of mine said in %&6(,

"If you see the breakup of ice shelves along the Antarctic peninsula,

"watch out "because that should be seen as an alarm bell for global

warming."

And actually, if you look at the peninsula up close, every place whereyou see one of these green blotches here is an ice shelf larger than the

state of 5hode Island that has broken up 1ust in the last %C to 8= years.

I want to focus on 1ust one of them.

It's called +arsen *.

I want you to look at these black pools here. It makes it seem almost as

if we're looking through the ice to the ocean beneath. *ut that's an

illusion. This is melting water that forms in pools, and if you were

flying over it in a helicopter, you'd see it's 6== feet tall. They are so

ma1estic, so massive.

In the distance are the mountains and 1ust before the mountains is theshelf of the continent, there. This is floating ice, and there's land>

based ice on the down slope of those mountains. rom here to the

mountains is about 8= to 8C miles. 0ow they thought this would be

stable for at least %== years, even with global warming.

The scientists who study these ice shelves were absolutely astonished

when they were looking at these images.


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/tarting on ?anuary based ice cracked up, it no longer

held back the ice on the land, and the land>based ice then started

falling into the ocean. It was like letting the cork out of a bottle.

And there's a difference between floating ice and land>based ice.

That's like the difference between an ice cube floating in a glass of

water, which when it melts doesn't raise the level of water in the glass,

and a cube that's sitting atop a stack of ice cubes which melts and flows

over the edge.

That's why the citi4ens of these @acific nations have all had to evacuate

to 0ew Healand.

*ut I want to focus on 2est Antarctica because it illustrates two factors

about land>based ice and sea>based ice. It's a little of both. It's

propped up on tops of islands, but the ocean comes up underneath it.

/o as the ocean gets warmer, it has an impact on it. If this were to go,

sea level worldwide would go up 8= feet.

They've measured disturbing changes on the underside of this ice sheet.

It's considered relatively more stable, however, than another big body of

ice that's roughly the same si4e. reenland would also raise sea level

almost 8= feet if it went.

A friend of mine 1ust brought back some pictures of what's going on onreenland right now.

7ramatic changes. These are the same kinds of pools that formed here, on

this ice shelf in Antarctica. And the scientists thought that when that

water seeped back into the ice, it would 1ust refree4e. *ut they found

out that actually what happens is that it 1ust keeps on going. It tunnels

to the bottom and makes the ice like /wiss cheese, sort of like termites.

This shows what happens to the crevasses, and when lakes form, they

create what are called moulins. water goes down to the bottom and it

lubricates where the ice meets the bedrock.

/ee these people here for scale. This is not on the edge of reenland,

this is in the middle of the ice mass. This is a massive rushing torrent

of fresh melt water tunneling straight down through the reenland ice to

the bedrock below.

0ow, to some e-tent, there has always been seasonal melting and moulins

have formed in the past, but not like now.


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In %&&8, they measured this amount of melting in reenland. Ten years

later, this is what happened. And here is the melting from 8==C. Tony

*lair's scientific advisor has said that because of what's happening in

reenland right now, the maps of the world will have to be redrawn.

If reenland broke up and melted, or if half of reenland and half of

2est Antarctica broke up and melted, this is what would happen to the sealevel in lorida.

This is what would happen to /an rancisco *ay.

A lot of people live in these areas.

The 0etherlands, one of the low countries.

Absolutely devastating.

The area around *ei1ing that's home to tens of millions of people.

#ven worse, in the area around /hanghai, there are 9= million people.

2orse still, $alcutta, and to the east, *angladesh, the area covered

includes = million people.

Think of the impact of a couple hundred thousand refugees when they're

displaced by an environmental event. And then imagine the impact of a

hundred million or more.

;ere's )anhattan.

This is the 2orld Trade $enter memorial site.

And after the horrible events of &%%, we said, "0ever again." *ut thisis what would happen to )anhattan.

They can measure this precisely, 1ust as the scientists could predict

precisely how much water would breach the levees in 0ew !rleans. The area

where the 2orld Trade $enter )emorial is to be located would be

underwater. Is it possible that we should prepare against other threats

besides terrorists3

)aybe we should be concerned

about other problems as well.

%.< billion people. An economy that's surging.

)ore and more energy needs. )assive coal reserves.The coal belt in 0orthern $hina,

> Inner )ongolia.

> 5ight.

Then there's /haan-i province.

> And also biggest coal mine here.

> p here.

> Yeah.

> 0ow, is that an open pit mine3


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> Yes.

> Yes.

#very time I've visited $hina, I've learned from their scientists.

They're right on the cutting edge. ive me some sense of the numbers of

new coal fire generating plants.

2ell, I have to say that the number is enormous because it's so

profitable. This issue is really the same for $hina as it is for the /.

2e are both using old technologies that are dirty and polluting. ..more

flooding and more drought and stronger storms is going up, and global

warming is implicated in the pattern. And if you were to give some

suggestions to everybody here about, like, what we can do for the

situation now.

/eparating the truth from the fiction and the accurate connections

from the misunderstandings is part of what you learn here.

*ut when the warnings are accurate and based on sound science, then we as

human beings, whatever country we live in, have to find a way to make

sure that the warnings are heard and responded to.

2e both have a hard time shaking loose the familiar patterns that we've

relied on in the past. 2e both face completely unacceptable consequences.

And there are three factors that are causing this collision, and the

first is population.

2hen my generation, the baby boom generation, was born after 2orld 2ar

II, the population had 1ust crossed the two billion mark.

0ow, I'm in my C=s, and it's already gone to almost si- and a halfbillion. And if I reach the demographic e-pectation for the baby boomers,

it'll go over nine billion. /o if it takes %=,=== generations to reach

two billion and then in one human lifetime, ours, it goes from two

billion to nine billion, something profoundly different going on right

now.

2e're putting more pressure on the #arth. )ost of it's in the poorer

nations of the world. This puts pressure on food demand. It puts pressure

on water demand. It puts pressure on vulnerable natural resources, and

this pressure's one of the reasons why we have seen all the devastation

of the forest, not only tropical, but elsewhere.

This is the border between ;aiti and the 7ominican 5epublic.!ne set of policies here, another set of policies here. )uch of it comes

not only because of cutting, but also burning.

Almost


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This is a time>lapse picture of the #arth at night over a si->month

period showing the lights of the cities in white and the burning forests

and brush fires in red. The yellow areas are the gas flares, like these

in /iberia. And that brings me to the second factor that has transformed

our relationship to the #arth.

The scientific and technological revolution is a great blessing in thatit has given us tremendous benefits in areas like medicine and

communications.

*ut this new power that we have also brings a responsibility to think

about its consequences.

;ere's a formula to think about. !ld habits plus old technology

have predictable consequences.

!ld habits that are hard to change plus new technology

can have dramatically altered consequences.

2arfare with spears and bows and arrows and rifles and machine guns,that's one thing.

*ut then a new technology came. 2e have to think differently about war

because the new technologies so completely transformed the consequences

of that old habit that we can't 1ust mindlessly continue the patterns of

the past. in the same way, we have always e-ploited the #arth for

sustenance.

or most of our e-istence, we used relatively simple tools.

The plow, the tractor. *ut even tools like shovels

are different now. /hovel used to be this. /hovels have gotten bigger.

And every year, they get more powerful.

/o our ability to have an effect, in this case on the surface of the

#arth, is utterly transformed.

You can say the same thing about irrigation, which is a great thing.

*ut when we divert rivers without considering the consequences, then

sometimes rivers no longer reach the sea. There were two rivers in

$entral Asia that were used by the former /oviet nion for irrigating

cotton fields unwisely. The Aral /ea was fed by them.

It used to be the fourth largest inland sea in the world.

2hen I went there, I saw this strange sight of an enormous fishing fleet

resting in the sand. This is the canal that the fishing industry

desperately tried to build to get to the receding shoreline. )akingmistakes in our dealings with nature can have bigger consequences now

because our technologies are often bigger than the human scale.

2hen you put them all together, they've made us a force of nature.

And this is also a political issue. This is a computer map of the world

that distorts to show the relative contributions to global warming.


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In our country, we are responsible for more than all of /outh America,

all of Africa, all of the )iddle #ast, all of Asia, all combined.

The per capita average in Africa, India, $hina, ?apan, #, 5ussia.

There's where we are. 2ay, way above everyone else. If you take

population into account, it's a little bit different. $hina's playing a

bigger role, so is #urope. *ut we are still by all odds the largestcontributor.

And so it is up to us to look at how we think about it, because our way

of thinking is the third and final factor that transforms our

relationship to the #arth. If a frog 1umps into a pot of boiling water,

it 1umps right out again because it senses the danger.

*ut the very same frog, if it 1umps into a pot of lukewarm water that is

slowly brought to a boil, will 1ust sit there and it won't move. It'll

1ust sit there, even as the temperature continues to go up and up. It'll

stay there, until... ntil it's rescued. It's important to rescue the

frog. *ut the point is this. !ur collective nervous system is like that

frog's nervous system.

It takes a sudden 1olt sometimes before we become aware of a danger.

If it seems gradual, even if it really is happening quickly, we're

capable of 1ust sitting there and not responding. And not reacting.

I don't remember a time when I was a kid when summertime didn't mean

working with tobacco. It was 1ust... I used to love it. It was during

that period when working with the guys on the farm seemed like fun to me.

/tarting in %&9, with the /urgeon eneral's report the evidence was

laid out on the connection between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer. 2e

kept growing tobacco. 0ancy was almost %= year older than me, and there

were only the two of us. and my friend at the same time.

/he started smoking when she was a teenager and never stopped. /he died

of lung cancer. That's one of the ways you don't want to die.

The idea that we had been part of that economic pattern that produced the

cigarettes, that produced the cancer, it was so... It was so painful on

so many levels. )y father, he had grown tobacco all his life. ;e stopped.

2hatever e-planation had seemed to make sense in the past, 1ust didn't

cut it anymore. ;e stopped it. It's 1ust human nature to take time to

connect the dots. I know that.

*ut I also know that there can be a day of reckoning when you wish you

had connected the dots more quickly. There are three misconceptions inparticular that bedevil our thinking. irst, isn't there a disagreement

among scientists about whether the problem is real or not3

Actually, not really.

There was a massive study of every scientific article in a peer>reviewed

1ournal written on global warming for the last %= years. And they took a

big sample of %=E, &8( articles. And you know the number of those that


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disagreed with the scientific consensus that we're causing global warming

and that it's a serious problem3 !ut of the &8(, 4ero. The misconception

that there's disagreement about the science has been deliberately created

by a relatively small group of people. !ne of their internal memos

leaked. And here's what it said, according to the press.

Their ob1ective is to reposition global warming as theory rather thanfact. This has happened before. After the /urgeon eneral's report. !ne

of their memos leaked 9= years ago. ;ere's what they said. "7oubt is our

product, "since it is the best means of creating a controversy in the

public's mind." *ut have they succeeded3

You'll remember that there were &8( peer>reviewed articles.

Hero percent disagreed with the consensus.

There was another study of all the articles in the popular press. !ver

the last %9 years, they looked at a sample of


22/25

I was trying to convince the previous administration, the first *ush

administration, to go to the #arth /ummit. And they organi4ed a big 2hite

;ouse conference to say, "!h, we're on top of this." And one of these

view graphs caught my attention. And I want to talk to you about it for a

minute.

0ow here is the choice that we have to make according to this group.

2e have here a scales that balances two different things. !n one side, we

have gold bars. 7on't they look good3 I'd 1ust like to have some of those

gold bars. !n the other side of the scales, the entire planet. I think

this is a false choice for two reasons. 0umber one, if we don't have a

planet... The other reason is that if we do the right thing, then we're

gonna create a lot of wealth

> and we're gonna create a lot of 1obs.

> Yes.

*ecause doing the right thing moves us forward. I've probably given this

slide show %,=== times. I would say, at least %,=== times. 0ashville toDno-villeto Aspen and /undance. +os Angeles and /an rancisco. @ortland,

)inneapolis. *oston, 0ew ;aven, +ondon, *russels, /tockholm, ;elsinki,

:ienna, )unich, Italy and /pain and $hina, /outh Dorea, ?apan.

Thank you.

I guess the thing I've spent more time on than anything else in this

slide show is trying to identify all those things in people's minds that

serve as obstacles to them understanding this.

And whenever I feel like I've identified an obstacle, I try to take it

apart, roll it away. )ove it. 7emolish it, blow it up. I set myself a

goal. $ommunicate this real clearly. The only way I know to do itis city by city, person by person, family by family.

> *ye>bye. Thank you again.

> *ye.

And I have faith that pretty soon enough minds are changed that we cross

a threshold. +et me give you an e-ample of the wrong way to balance the

economy and the environment. !ne part of this issue

involve automobiles.

?apan has mileage standards up here.

#urope plans to pass ?apan.

!ur allies in Australia and $anada are leaving us behind.;ere is where we are. 0ow there's a reason for it.

They say that we can't protect the environment too much

without threatening the economy and threatening the automakers.

*ecause automakers in $hina might come in and 1ust steal all our markets.

2ell, here is where $hina's auto mileage standards are now.

2ay above ours.


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2e can't sell our cars in $hina today because we don't meet the $hinese

environmental standards.

$alifornia has taken an initiative to have higher>mileage cars sold in

$alifornia.

0ow the auto companies have sued $alifornia to prevent this law from

taking effect because, as they point out, %% years from now this wouldmean that $alifornia would have to have cars for sale that are as

efficient %% years from now as $hina's are today. $learly too onerous a

provision to comply with. And is this helping our companies succeed3

2ell, actually, if you look at who's doing well in the world, it's the

companies that are building more>efficient cars.

And our companies are in deep trouble.

inal misconception. If we accept that this problem is real, maybe it's

1ust too big to do anything about. And, you know, there are a lot of

people who go straight from denial to despair without pausing on the

intermediate step of actually doing something about the problem.

And that's what I'd like to finish with. The fact that we already know

everything we need to know to effectively address this problem. 2e've got

to do a lot of things, not 1ust one.

If we use more efficient electricity appliances, we can save this much

off of the global warming pollution that would otherwise be put into the

atmosphere. If we use other end>use efficiency, this much. If we have

higher mileage cars, this much. And all these begin to add up. !ther

transport efficiency, renewable technology, carbon capture and

sequestration. A big solution that you're gonna be hearing a lot more

about. They all add up, and pretty soon we are below our %&6= emissions.

2e have everything we need, save perhaps political will. *ut you knowwhat3 In America, political will is a renewable resource. 2e have the

ability to do this.

#ach one of us is a cause of global warming, but each of us can make

choices to change that. 2ith the things we buy, the electricity we use,

the cars we drive, we can make choices to bring our individual carbon

emissions to 4ero. The solutions are in our hand. 2e 1ust have to have

the determination to make them happen.

Are we gonna be left behind as the rest of the world moves forward3

All of these nations have ratified Dyoto. There are only two advanced

nations in the world that have not ratified Dyoto, and we are one of

them. The other is Australia.

+uckily, several states are taking the initiative. The nine northeastern

states have banded together on reducing $!8. $alifornia and !regon are

taking the initiative. @ennsylvania's e-ercising leadership on solar

power and wind power. And / cities are stepping up to the plate. !ne

after the other, we have seen all of these cities pledge to take on

global warming.


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/o what about the rest of us3 ltimately this question comes down to

this. Are we, as Americans, capable of doing great things even though

they are difficult3 Are we capable of rising above ourselves and above

history3 2ell, the record indicates that we do have that capacity.

2e formed a nation,

we fought a revolution and brought something newto this #arth, a free nation guaranteeing individual liberty. America

made a moral decision. Its slavery was wrong, and that we could not be

half free and half slave.

2e, as Americans, decided that of course women should have the right to

vote. 2e defeated totalitarianism and won a war in the @acific and the

Atlantic simultaneously. 2e desegregated our schools. And we cured

fearsome diseases like polio. 2e landed on the moon. The very e-ample of

what's possible when we are at our best. 2e worked together in a

completely bipartisan way to bring down communism. 2e have even solved a

global environmental crisis before, the hole in the stratospheric o4one

layer.

This was said to be an impossible problem to solve because it's

a global environmental challenge requiring cooperation from every nation

in the world. *ut we took it on. And the nited /tates took the lead in

phasing out the chemicals that caused that problem. /o now we have to use

our political processes in our democracy, and then decide to act together

to solve those problems. *ut we have to have a different perspective on

this one. It's different from any problem we have ever faced before.

You remember that home movie of the #arth spinning in space3 !ne of those

spacecraft continuingJiKon out into the universe, when it got four

billion miles out in space,

$arl /agan said, "+et's take another picture of the #arth." You see thatpale blue dot3 That's us. #verything that has ever happened in all of

human history has happened on that pi-el. All the triumphs and all the

tragedies. All the wars, all the famines. All the ma1or advances.

It's our only home. And that is what is at stake. !ur ability to live on

planet #arth, to have a future as a civili4ation. I believe this is a

moral issue. It is your time to sei4e this issue.

It is our time to rise again, to secure our future. There's nothing that

unusual about what I'm doing with this. 2hat is unusual is that I had

the privilege to be shown it as a young man.

+adies and gentlemen, )r. Al ore.

It's almost as if a window was opened through which the future was very

clearly visible. /ee that3" he said, "/ee that3 "That's the future in

which you are going to live your life."

uture generations may well have occasion to ask themselves, 2hat were

our parents thinking3 2hy didn't they wake up when they had a chance3"

2e have to hear that question from them, now.


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An Inconvenient Truth (2006)-Subtitle in Ms. Word(1)

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